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Malice Afterthought

American Splendor: Ego & Hubris: The Michael Malice Story Harvey Pekar, Gary Dumm Ballantine Books, 2006 Rating: 3.5

Posted: September 2, 2006

By Kevin Forest Moreau

The success of the American Splendor movie has afforded Harvey Pekar what he’s always wanted: to cash in on what little pop-cultural cachet he possesses in order to collect more writing work, including a couple of book contracts. Last year’s unflinching and slightly unfocused memoir The Quitter was one result; Ego & Hubris is another. Both, in their own ways, are diversions from the slice-of-life vignettes, autobiographical snapshots and occasional music essays that made up most of his American Splendor output. But not huge diversions: The Quitter, for example, was basically a Splendor story expanded to book length, a brave, obsessive and self-critical look at the roots of the writer’s many neuroses and his unique worldview.

Likewise, Ego & Hubris: The Michael Malice Story is a book-length examination of the traits, beliefs and biography of a peculiar individual. This time, however, it’s not Pekar himself (as the title pretty much gives away) but one real-life Michael Malice, as self-centered, arrogant and unlikable a character as any author could dream up. Pekar more or less gives over more than 150 pages to Malice, who relates his life story in his own voice, and it’s easy to see why Pekar found him a fascinating subject. He’s cruel, bitter, vindictive and combative.

What’s less clear is what we’re supposed to take away from Malice’s story. One might argue that Pekar is merely chronicling one man’s story, just as he’s done in American Splendor, and leaving us to find our own answers -- or even just to mutter to ourselves, “Wow, what a dick.” That’s valid, but one can conversely argue that it’s something of a copout. Pekar has certainly painted unflattering pictures of himself in American Splendor, but what makes those stories interesting -- and, perhaps more importantly, relatable -- is his acknowledgment that he’s not normal, that he’s a victim of his own neuroses and shortcomings. Pekar isn’t always apologetic about the way he is -- he understands that, for all the trauma he causes himself, these aspects of himself are also responsible for his creativity. Implicit -- and sometimes explicit -- in Pekar’s self-examination is a concession: “I know you’re not supposed to act this way,” he seems to say, “but it’s what I’ve got and I might as well try to learn from it and perhaps do better.”

Michael Malice, by contrast, never questions himself, never wavers in his belief that he is smarter than everyone else -- that he is right and they are wrong. And that’s all the justification he needs to treat others boorishly. He spitefully mails a pimply former co-worker a tube of acne cream. He antagonizes his college professors; he take delight in the fact that the wife of someone he dislikes has died from cancer. He gets a security guard fired for reacting to his provocations.

The closest Ego & Hubris comes to a cathartic moment is when Malice lands a creative job in television. “I was right in kindergarten. I was right in second grade. I was right in high school, in college, at work,” he says. Getting a job where he’s paid to think is a validation -- proof that he’s been right to belittle the beliefs of those who think differently than he does, to deride others for their ignorance, to take every conflict personally and to overreact to every imagined slight.

That’s all well and good -- if Malice wants to feel he’s been unjustly persecuted all his life, and that thus he’s been within his rights to live as an asshole, well, it’s a free country. But it’s Pekar’s book, at least nominally. Why doesn’t he challenge his subject at all, or at least interject to let the reader know what he thinks of all this? Pekar doesn’t call Malice on any of his actions -- he doesn’t react at all, that we can see. When he appears at all, it’s in a scene where Michael writes to him and goes to meet him; it’s a re-enactment.

It’s one thing to present someone else’s story as a short feature in an anthology -- in that instance, it’s easy to write it off as a comics-vérité sketch; its very existence seems to imply, “Isn’t this guy nuts?” In a longer work, though, you risk seeming to endorse such behavior, or at least to condone it. Pekar’s spent decades building an angry-guy persona; but this guy, he doesn’t get angry with -- at least not that we see.

He’s also spent decades establishing himself as a contrarian everyman willing to take a long, hard look at himself and catalog his flaws for all to see. If he were telling us Malice’s story, maybe we’d get some of that. But by letting Malice randomly narrate his own tale, he fails the reader here, as well. Since Pekar has slapped his American Splendor brand on this book, we’re predisposed to think that we’ll gain some sort of insight. Even a one-page sketch about the joys of a glass of lemonade has a point to it, a little bullet of a message about the importance of enjoying life’s simple pleasures. But Ego & Hubris just feels pointless.

Whether he just never thought to put himself in the story to call Malice out on his behaviors, or didn’t want to risk diluting Malice’s voice, or just didn’t feel like bothering, the result is the same: We put down Ego & Hubris with a mental shrug. So Malice is an asshole. Well, so what? The world’s full of assholes. What makes this one so special? What makes him worthy of 152 pages of pettiness and rationalization? Simply put, if we learn nothing from his story, then the answer is likewise nothing.

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